Air Power 2017

26 AIR POWER 2017 21 ST CENTURY PARTNERSHIPS

FOREWORD

recently exploited this at the Paris Airshow and MAST in Japan,

and will aim to do so again at DSEI in London in September.

Under the umbrella of the DGP, the Defence Solutions Centre

provides a new collaborative working environment to promote

innovation and investment in the defence sector, identifying

innovative and tailored solutions to meet Defence’s needs and

determining road maps to guide future investment decisions

and improve competitiveness. Scanning a 15-year horizon,

the Defence Solutions Centre is able to exploit collaborative

opportunities in the pre-competitive space to enable and

embed innovation across the whole Defence industry. This is

good for our industrial partners, but, even more importantly,

it also paves the way to our future operational advantage.

So, in addition to maintaining our 2015 Strategic Defence

and Security Review Pledge to committing £178 billion to the

equipment programme over 10 years, we are energetically pursuing

ways in which that investment can generate both battle-winning

and contract-winning returns for our armed forces and industry.

We are also making sure that our Armed Forces are exploiting the

opportunities for reinvestment in capabilities that the delegated

funding arrangements to the Service chiefs has provided. Now that

the RAF can choose how best to spend and invest its resources,

it, too, is incentivised to find efficiencies that increase its financial

manoeuvre space for optimising capability enhancements. The

Typhoon Total Availability eNterprise (TyTAN) is a case in point:

by brigading together a hitherto disaggregated collection of

engineering and support arrangements into a cohesive whole,

cost savings in the region of 40% are being achieved, while at

the same time improving Typhoon fleet availability. The RAF

is able to reinvest those savings into Typhoon’s capabilities –

avionics, weapons and more – which will make the aircraft more

competitive in the export market, as well as on operations.

Because the RAF operates at the frontier of technological

development, it spearheads not only the nation’s military

operations abroad and closer to home, but also works hand

in hand with industry to deliver ever more capable and better

integrated capabilities across the spectrum of its activities. The

RAF’s successes are, therefore, a tribute not only to the unrivalled

prowess of its members, but also to the quality of the partnerships

it shares with industry. As the RAF approaches its centenary, we

can look forward to an exciting new era in which revolutionary

capabilities such as the F-35 are supported and enhanced by

revolutionary partnerships – delivering competitive advantage

not only in the battlespace, but in the business space, too.

The RAF will be able to reinvest TyTAN’s through-life support cost-savings to further improve Typhoon’s capabilities (PHOTO: SAC CHRIS ELLIS/© CROWN COPYRIGHT)